[vos-d] status and scheming

[Karsten Otto]

Quick thought -

If the server has to track every animation that is currently playing,  
it generates quite a lot of traffic, especially since the really cool  
worlds usually require many many tiny animations.

However, I think a lot of these do not really have to be synchronized  
among clients; I think it is generally overkill to sync every frame  
of a rotating advertisement board.

So, IMHO, the server should establish a generic common time among  
clients, sending out regular ticks for that only. Starting an  
animation then is just a reference to this virtual time, maybe with a  
speed factor etc., same as stopping it. It is up to the clients to  
interpolate the animation, adjusting it based on the genenric virtual  
time.

This approach is also much better from a semantics point of view.  
There is a sense of "now" (well, at least "now-ish"), and an  
indication that "[dog] starts [barking] [now]"... with proper  
identifiers for [dog] and [barking], an agent can understand whats  
going on.

Oh, btw... we are speaking of a "server" here, but VOS is still  
conceptually P2P, even if in practice it degenerated to client-server  
due to firewall issues. Time coordination among peers is nasty; I'd  
suggest the site hosting the sector vobject should act as a time  
coordinator (read "server" above) then.

Regards,
Karsten Otto (kao)


Am 01.12.2006 um 13:43 schrieb Jonathan Jones:

> S Mattison wrote:
>> On 11/30/06, Peter Amstutz <tetron at interreality.org> wrote:
>>
>> interesting, though, is that the relationship between the time on
>> the animation track, and world time, is kind of like the distinction
>> between world space and object space -- that the time parameter that
>> gets plugged into the animation loop has a linear transform  
>> relationship
>> with the "world" time.
>>
>> Just don't stop the world for the animation of a single object.  
>> All the users in a world should have the model, and should also  
>> know what animation the model is doing, but they don't necessarily  
>> need to know what frame of animation it is on. Updating each user,  
>> frame by frame, would slow the server to a crawl, imo.
> All the server has to do is update the clients now and again on  
> what frame the animation is on, and how fast it's animating, that  
> should be sufficient to keep the clients in sync.
>
>  -sconzey
> <sconzey.vcf>
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